Tyrants of the Heart: A Psychoanalytic Study of Mothers and Maternal Images in James Joyce by Michael Zimmerman

Advance Praise for this book:

Anyone looking for a new path into the brilliant and often impenetrable literary world of James Joyce needs to read Michael Zimmerman’s beautifully written book, Tyrants of the Heart. Drawing upon his years of experience as both an English professor and a psychoanalyst, Zimmerman uncovers conflicts in Joyce’s characters (and indirectly in Joyce) that are inherent in love between a son and mother and that have not been addressed before. His book is an extraordinarily rich, thought-provoking analysis of Joyce’s use of maternal images as Joyce explored what he called the “individuating rhythm” of a character’s life. And in a delightfully creative and humorous “Cadenza” (a takeoff of a scene in Ulysses), Zimmerman depicts a literary discussion between himself, a few characters in Joyce’s novels, and some Dublin literary figures, in which the author convincingly defends his psychoanalytic examination of recurrent themes, phrases and images in Joyce’s writing.